Expat wanderer

LOL at Notice to Sue

Today I got this notice:

Dear Admin,

Myself Majed M Garoup, senior legal Executive. We need to bring a serious concern infront of you regarding an article which you have posted on your blog https://intlxpatr.wordpress.com/. The article which you have posted contains defamatory content about our country. It has some news which is not relevant and also having some wrong statements about the country which is purely illegal. Publishing this kind of half true matters through online is a punishable offense. Before posting any article about a particular country you need to verify those things to us. You need to ask the story from both the parties while publishing such kind of articles. But we haven’t recieved any such calls or mails from your side. Posting such news without proper confirmation from the relevant party is a serious crime.And you are a blogger and don’t have any rights to publish this kind of news on your blog. So this page should get remove imediately from your blog otherwise legal action will be taken against your wordpress blog for posting defamatory content and half true matters on your blog which is spoiling the reputation of our country.

The post is a reprint of an article on labor abuse in Qatar from a Lebanese paper. I guess he’s feeling a little touchy; Qatar is getting a lot of unwelcome publicity lately for labor abuses. How is that for a country whose labor laws give everyone except household help a day off?

No. It’s a newspaper article I reprinted. One of the reasons I do it is because I still have a lot of Qatar readers and they often don’t see these items in Qatar news. They only have a ‘kind-of-free” press. He’s threatening WordPress, suing them if I won’t remove the blog post. I just have a feeling it’s not enforceable. We’ll see.